ABBYY Vantage Reviews

We use this solution to extract data, and to combine it with other solutions to provide end to end processes.

We like the fact that this solution is enterprise-ready, so it can be deployed on-premises, scale it, etc.

We would like the workflow building within this solution to be more transparent, which would allow us to model the process.

Also, the large number of components within this tool can make deploying and managing the solution quite complex.

Lastly, we feel that the usability of the interface could be improved by the use of cognitive capabilities, to make it more user-friendly. At present it is quite complicated to understand how to use this solution, and can take time to master effectively.

We have been working with this solution for two years, but we have been more actively engaging with it for the past year.

This is a fairly stable solution. In our experience there have ben some issues, but these have not stopped production. Instead it has cost us time in order to contact support, understand the issue, and then to mitigate future risk.

This is a scalable solution, as far as we are aware.

The support for this solution tend to respond in a timely fashion. However, more complex issues may mean a delay in replies.

Positive

This solution is fairly complex, even for expert users, to setup and deploy. There are a lot of components involved in the initial setup, and a lot of documentation to go through in order to deploy the tool successfully.

The licenses for this solution are payable on a yearly basis, and are transferable from one year to the next, if they go unused.  The license payment also includes a number of support hours from the vendor.

I would recommend organizations to evaluate this solution if they are looking into data extraction products. It is complex to implement and use, meaning it will require time to use effectively, but it provides good results.

We would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our company uses the solution for processing invoices that follow a particular template. We have some standard invoices on a monthly basis and use UiPath to download them from our suppliers. The downloads are extracted and exported to the solution.

We previously used the solution's on-premises version but it is no longer supported. We used the trial cloud version until we bought our license one month ago. 

We are in the development phase but once we go live, we will have many users for the verification station.

The solution has its own language that can be configured many ways and with higher accuracy than other products.

Programming interfaces should include intelligence or documentation. It is difficult to find documentation and implement without some information included in the backend scripting pages.

The support network is weak and needs improvement.

I have been using the solution for one year.

The solution is stable for documents that are standard format.

The solution is scalable.

The support is weak and it is difficult to find answers for day-to-day problems. There is no forum for answers and not many users are familiar with the solution to help with issues. The provider should have documentation for everything but it is not reaching end users.

Tickets are not responded to in a timely manner and it is difficult to get email responses or escalations. There is no standard format for support and they just respond whenever they like. In contrast, UiPath helped with anything needed.

I rate support a four out of ten.

Neutral

We used UiPath's Document Understanding but it had issues finding items that were marked in particular locations.

Accuracy is comparatively higher for the solution. You have the option to write rules in the backend which can be manually verified if a document does not satisfy conditions. Once verification is complete, the document feeds back and the solution picks up the rest of the processing. This flexibility was not available in UiPath.

UiPath also required too much user involvement at the time of our implementation, but I believe this has improved over time.

The cloud setup is straightforward and only requires configuring the development environment which includes flexi layout studio and product setup station. Any security concerns can be addressed through an SSO or AD integration.

The on-premises setup is a bit complex because it requires understanding connections.

We implemented the solution in-house.

Maintenance and updates for the cloud version are handled by ABBYY. We receive notification of updates in advance. Typically, an update requires some upgrade in the development environment to ensure there is no impact to users.

Our license is $6,000 and includes unlimited users for the verification station.

Licensing is a bit on the high side.

We looked at ABBYY's invoice processing but were not satisfied with the results so we moved to the solution.

The solution is the best for use cases with standard document templates. If your documents do not follow a particular format, then you cannot use the solution. 

The features for AI and processing lag behind so I rate AI a five out of ten.

Overall, for our purpose with standard document templates, I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

We use this solution for supplier invoice processing work. We started using it because we needed a solution for supplier invoice automation.

The solution is deployed on-premises.

There are about 20 end users.

It's easy to use.

I would like to see a machine learning model to make the solution more intelligent.

There are no issues with stability.

Initial setup is easy.

It costs 5,000 Euro per year for one license. There are almost 500,000 pages available, so I think the price is good for what we have. It's worth the money.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. 

There are some technical constraints, but if you can address those, then the solution is good to use.

There are competitors, so I would like the ability to explore more options.

Our primary use case for this solution is invoice processing. We have many different invoices on different maps so we use it as a tool to classify those documents and get the information that we enter into the SAP systems.

ABBYY Vantage is easy to use and allows us to run through documents and extract information.

The overall integration could be better. For example, the modelling, classification and handwritten information are not great. From my perspective, Hyperscience does the handwritten processes a lot better than ABBYY Vantage. Additionally, the overall end-to-end processes experience can also be improved in terms of how information is fed to ABBYY. By having the overall process flow built with ABBYY Vantage, it can hold up as an independent tool.

We have been using this solution for approximately one year. We deploy this solution on cloud and are currently using the latest version.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. We can add new users without any issues. However, we do not need to add users often because the primary point is to reduce the number of users. Additionally, we are consultants, so we build and deploy solutions for our clients. Currently, we have five people involved in this process who are using and leveraging this product.

We have not had to contact customer service and support yet.

The initial setup was straightforward, and deployment was very quick as we used the ABBYY cloud setup that was provided. We didn't have to separate the installation and setup process. It was primarily structured on passing on documents and getting the information back.

The ROI is visible when there is enough volume of documents available. For example, if there are two documents a week, there would not be a good ROI, but if we have many invoices from large companies, there will be a high ROI.

I cannot give a specific figure for pricing because it is unique to each client. We negotiate at different times for different clients, depending on the size of their organization. However, I believe the price is a bundled package.

ABBYY Vantage is a good tool. In this space that we work in, Hyperscience and ABBYY Vantage are two essential tools that we work with. Others include Bioscript and many more, but these two are the primary tools because of their maturity and capability. Therefore, these are our tools of choice.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. The solution is good and stable, but its overall integration could be improved. Our advice to customers will be to understand their business cases because it is attached to document processing, so there is a bundled cost with this product. It is necessary to understand the volumes and the documents being worked with. Understanding the volume and quality of documents that are being processed is necessary to ensure success.

It would be during the data extraction process. The ability to extract and insert data, then structuralize it into the actionable format, would be the most valuable.

I would have liked to see them make it easier for business users to implement themselves. This is what they have done with Vantage, which is essentially a low code/no code, slightly enhanced version of FlexiCapture that is already available.

I have been involved with ABBYY FlexiCapture off and on for approximately one year.

ABBYY FlexiCapture is a stable product. The stability is good.

The scalability of ABBYY FlexiCapture is good.

This solution is used on a daily basis throughout the organization.

My company has approximately 230,000 employees worldwide.

The technical support is good. They solve problems relatively quickly.

I am familiar with IBM Datacap.

The initial setup was relatively complex. The people who install it must be knowledgeable about what they are doing.

It took some time to get everything up and running properly.

The deployment was completed in-house.

We have seen a return on investment, but I'm not sure how much.

It would be far too difficult. Because we obviously deliver these types of solutions not only in-house but also for a large number of other companies. There's plenty of ROI that we have managed to deliver for our customers, in particular, but I can't give you figures.

I don't recall the pricing.

In terms of intelligent document processing, the company uses a variety of platforms, including IBM Datacap and ABBYYFlexiCapture, among others. We were constantly reviewing market products, and we were also doing things like Hyperscience. At the moment, I'm working on a review for Vantage, which is ABBYY's other recently released product, rather than FlexiCapture.

We are partners with ABBYY.

If you are going to implement it, I would recommend a combination of engaging with a delivery partner to accelerate your initial setup and scalability and then building your own internal capability, which requires accredited users, in parallel.

Because FlexiCapture requires a significant amount of domain knowledge or technical capability to implement. I am not sure if this is outside the scope of your research, but if a company is looking to implement ABBYY products in general and does not want to require a significant increase in internal capabilities, ABBYY Vantage may be a better option.

I would rate ABBYY FlexiCapture an eight out of ten.

The most valuable feature of ABBYY FlexiCapture is the ability to create your own template on the fly. You can train and classify, you can work with those different templates without the need to do special programming for it or with minimum programming. Additionally, the solution is supporting the Arabic OCR, both of these combined features are the most important for us in the Egyptian market.

ABBYY FlexiCapture could improve the performance. We are looking for better performance because it can be a lengthy capture process and the accuracy needs to be enhanced when it comes to Arabic.

In the next upgrade, ABBYY FlexiCapture could add invoices for the Arabic or for the Middle East because it's based on European or American standards mainly.

I have been using ABBYY FlexiCapture for approximately four years.

ABBYY FlexiCapture is stable, we did not find any problems.

In our usage, ABBYY FlexiCapture has been scalable enough. We had a cluster-based operation.

I rate the support form ABBYY FlexiCapture a four out of five.

The support could be more responsive.

I have used OpenText previously and overall the solution might work better, but for our use case, ABBYY FlexiCapture has all the features we need that are important, such as Arabic OCR, and is priced well.

The initial setup of ABBYY FlexiCapture is easy.

The price of ABBYY FlexiCapture is better than some competitors, such as OpenText.

I recommend this solution to others.

I rate ABBYY FlexiCapture an eight out of ten.

We are a logistics company, and, due to the fact that a lot of documents get generated on a daily basis, documents need to be processed and data extracted. That's our primary use case for this solution. We use it for a lot of data extraction.

The fact that IBM Datacap uses ABBYY's core engine for OCR, is quite useful for us. It makes them one of the key players as far as OCR extraction is concerned. 

The fact that they've packaged it very well in the sense that you have these field extraction batches which enable you to auto claim the documents, and you have these templates which are structurally laid out, which enables you to mark a specific zone from which data can be extracted. 

It saves us a lot of manual work.

The automation on offer is good.

Technical support, for the most part, is helpful.

A lot of things could be improved, especially if you look at the number of support tickets that we have created. Looking at those would indicate the things that can be improved. 

For example, more often than not, we are forced to rely on template creation in order to bring the accuracy of extraction to 100%. 

Even though the training works, it's not as good as it is made out to be. In our case, we've got thousands of suppliers and it is just not humanly possible for us to keep creating templates for each one of these suppliers. What we would need is an out-of-the-box extraction to be even more accurate, or for the training to improve in such a way that just the training should be able to give us a reasonable amount of accuracy. I know that 100% is too high a limit to aim at, however, even if we get close to 85% to 90% margin, it would be much better. Something that could do that out of the box would solve most of the problems.

ABBYY introduced a reporting data warehouse last December, however, that reporting data warehouse has its own fair share of problems. Something like accuracy and completeness of out-of-the-box recognition is something that should be available as part of your default reports in the tool itself. Right now, that is missing. 

ABBYY provides a document definition for an invoice, however, that invoice is a supplier invoice. In our organization, we deal with commercial invoices most of the time. The problem there is that supplier invoices. If you put them into the system, it gives you around 80% to 85% accuracy out of the box. However, with commercial invoices, you only get around 60% accuracy out of the box.

Based on the input that we have provided, ABBYY is now working on including the commercial invoices as well as part of that default invoice document definition. They are working on that as well. There are a lot of minor things that have come up. For example, when you create a template, ABBYY claims that you can export the default template that is generated as part of the training, and then make changes to that and then import it back. What we found was that the concept applies only to certain things. The training of the line items cannot be exported as a template. They said it's to do with the way machine learning was being applied and all that. However, these are all things which kind of increase the development time.

I have a couple of years' experience with this solution. I've been working with it since about 2019.

The performance can improve. Even though we have tried out the solution's provider, ABBYY, in terms of having more processing stations, all still boils down to the fact of how your application is configured. For example, in our case, we have about five processing stations in production. When we started off, it took almost 60 seconds to process one page because of the complex nature of our application. We had around five document types, and each type has to be classified based on a set of keywords, and then you had to apply the document definitions on top of them. Then it goes through this concept of the generic layout and the additional layout and so forth. Almost every page used to take about 60 seconds on average. Then we made a lot of tweaks to the application and then we brought it down to around 22 seconds per page.

That said, even then, when you're talking about the space that we are in, the domain that we are working in, sometimes a 100-page document has to be processed within around 30 minutes. If you take a 100-page document, only for processing that itself, it takes almost close to an hour. Then, what happens is that additional stages like verification, et cetera, by the time the data is exported and uploaded into the target system, it's taken too long.

With the normal ABBYY support, you go to support.abby.com and you raise tickets. The support is almost immediate. There are constant responses that come to you. However, what I've also seen is that there are a lot of complex problems for which we have not gotten the solution we need. While the response has been great, if you asked me whether all the queries for the problems that we raised have been solved, the answer is no. On the other hand, we also have a chance to interact with the ABBYY professional services team directly due to the contract that has been established with our organization. They are a wonderful bunch of people and there's this personal rapport that we have with them. We get in touch with them on a weekly basis and our query is resolved.

In our organization, it is the IT team that takes care of the installation. I do not have much information about the process and I wasn't really a part of it. 

We're just a customer and an end-user.

I'd advise users that, when you start off with your first project on FlexiCapture, choose a project which has at least something which can accommodate a very high pattern. For example, if you're going to go for a use case wherein documents have to be processed within the next 30 minutes, you're going to face a lot of problems. ABBYY is a wonderful tool, however, it has got its own set of constraints. It's very important to understand the constraints of the tool.

The strength of the ABBYY FlexiCapture license is the OCR engine. However, if you're extracting it to process millions of documents within a very small amount of time, that is not going to happen. 

It's very, very important for the final operators who are going to use the tool to understand what OCR is all about. The problems that we face are not technical at all. It is about trying to convince people, people who have been doing operations manually to change their processes. If you have a situation where people are looking at documents, looking at the data, and entering it into a system, and then come and tell them that the solution will extract that information automatically and they just have to verify that information, they'll need to change their approach. 

It's very important to get the business team who will be doing the verification into a meeting, in order to help them understand what OCR is, and also its limitations. 

You will need to specify the stock field and the zones. OCR is able to learn on its own and understand how to extract data from it. However, there are certain things that you will have to teach people. You have to tell them the fact that a page is converted into black and white, and that the gray areas either cannot be black or white as certain characters that are being recognized may turn out to be something else. OCR tells you the level of confidence based on what gets extracted. All this has to be translated to the business team so that they understand the tool and its limitations. If you do this, you can ensure the success of the project.

Therefore, while ABBYY, as a tool, is great, there is a lot of work that needs to be done before you start implementing it.

I'd rate the solution overall at a nine out of ten. We have had to initiate a lot of fixes, however, overall, it's quite good.

We need to understand ABBYY Vantage to add some projects and push them to our customers.

I have worked on many different OCR extraction tools, like document understanding, which uses ML technology. Compared to other tools, ABBYY Vantage is better because it's very user-friendly. It has a wide variety where we can manipulate or code the document as per our specifications, like OCR or many more specifications.

Since we are using a trial version, we don't have administration access to create a tenant to integrate my OCR series with Postman. Right now, we are doing one POC, and to complete that POC, we need that access because it's a requirement.

I have been using ABBYY Vantage for a couple of months.

In my team, three to four people are using ABBYY Vantage.

Our experience with our FlexiCapture was good. In FlexiCapture, you have to create templates because it does not use ML or AI technology. We learned that ABBYY Vantage uses ML technology, and we want to explore it.

ABBYY Vantage's initial setup is very beautiful. We didn't face any hurdles during the setup.

The solution is deployed on ABBYY cloud in our organization.

Overall, I rate ABBYY Vantage an eight out of ten.